Mr. Speaker, October 1 marks National Seniors Day, and my riding of Etobicoke Centre is the home for 40,000 seniors, which ranks eighth in the population of seniors in Canada.
I think we all agree that our seniors are the generation we commonly refer to as the “greatest generation”, who served our nation and established the principles we value today. We are still guided by the principles of freedom, democracy, and opportunity that this generation fought for and defended for us all. This is a debt we can never adequately repay.
We must all ensure that our seniors live with dignity and with honour. We must ensure that those living with diminished capacities are treated with the respect, care, love, and security they deserve, in the way they treated us until we were prepared to take the torch from their hands.
The totalitarian threats that our greatest generation fought against are once again threatening Canada and the world, and we, as a democracy, must address them.
We owe it to our seniors to keep our democracy strong and our nation vibrant, so that our seniors can live in the peace that they earned and that we will one day pass on to the following generation.
I stand in this House to honour our seniors today and to thank them for all they have done for us. Their legacy is our great nation of Canada.